Posted on 04/25/2023 7:02:37 AM PDT by AT7Saluki
A new report has found that the millions of taxpayer-funded Chromebooks that flooded schools during the pandemic are being discarded because of their expiration dates.
Chromebooks were an affordable way to help educate students during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they weren’t programmed to last. Chromebooks have a built-in “death date,” after which software support ends. Once laptops have “expired,” they don’t receive updates and can’t access secure websites.
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund shows replacement parts are both expensive and hard to obtain. In numerous cases, replacement keyboards would cost around $90, roughly half the cost of most Chromebooks. As a result, schools are now tossing the devices, creating a massive amount of electronics waste.
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Silly, they could be made to run a lightweight Linux Distro.
Well that is very shortsighted, first that they have the date and second that no one figured out a good solution. Throwing them out is idiotic.
Has anyone bothered to check as to whether children can learn anything using computers? Typically, in American ‘education’, at least, no one bothers with such details.
I’m running an old windows and it warns me regularly that it doesn’t support this or that, such as Edge. But the things I use run fine.
I back up regularly to a thumb drive.
Here at work they replace our desktop and laptop computers when the manufacturer’s warranty runs out.
They’ve switched most of us to laptops so we can work at home some of the time.
One of these days I’ll go to a computer specialty store and get hardware and software modernized.
I really like my Chromebooks. I despise it when I have to use a Windows (wait) machine for the tasks that a Chromebook won’t do. It is a real joy to do a cold boot in 15 seconds and it never slows down with age like a wait machine does.
I’d be surprised if the average school Chromebook even lasts 2 years.
Four years for a child’s laptop is probably above average, especially if you run it off battery and recharge every night. My average life is around five years, but before then it goes to a secondary job and I buy a new primary one for day to day use.
No need, schools have billions to waste.
I like them too.
Throwing them away?! So wasteful. Let’s say that $90 keyboard dies. Fine. Plug a $10 keyboard in the USB port and you are back in business. If you don’t have an old monitor and mouse to also add, you can use it for a special purpose device (e.g. music player).
Imagine the “cost” of a politically connected IT company getting paid to install Linux on all those computers. Of course it would have to be staffed by representatives of the “inclusive” community. Sam Brinton could be team lead. Sure the students could learn how in a tech course but why teach the kids this stuff when a politically connected company can fleece the taxpayer for millions?
I've avoided Chromebooks as I have plenty of good hardware running Windows and Linux. Over the last 20 years, I would retire a Windows system and put Linux on the hardware. That significantly extended the service life. Last year, one of the Linux machines failed to boot after upgraded Fedora. Why? The Fedora release was UEFI ONLY. It would not boot on legacy DOS filesystems using MBR and traditional partition tables. I discarded the motherboard, CPU, RAM and power supply. The box was fine to host a new motherboard/CPU/RAM/Power supply. It's likely good for many more years now.
If you have a good line on how to update the Chromebooks to a Linux distro, you could probably make some decent money buying lots of "discarded" Chromebooks, updating with Linux and reselling.
Funny you say that...there are several non-profits that do just that for schools with taxpayer funds via grants.
When I was a kid....Walking to school barefoot uphill, in the snow, both ways...
Pack of #2 pencils about $3. Stack of notepaper. 100 sheets for $1. Peechee folders 25 cents.
Never needed hardware upgrades. Never needed software upgrades.
In the San Diego area, the iPads were damaged or stolen shortly after the school district coughed up a significant amount of money for them. It was a huge waste of money.
In my shop I use my rock solid XP machines to run two CNC machines and another that runs a CMM. The old engineering software on them still works fine and every once in a while I still use them for that. Of course I don’t use them on the web so not much of a problem with viruses and upgrades. I despise the new windows and their forced background updates that have wasted countless hours and cost me thousands of dollars.
I’ve always used Chromebooks, and for surfing the web, bank and CC access, paying bills, emails, etc, they work just fine. I usually buy reconditioned ones on Ebay for between $50-$75. When they crap out I just buy another. I have three right now; the oldest 6+ yrs old, and it still runs fine.
Microsoft now demands your birth date, address, and email to create a secure ‘account’, and sell to the Chinese, in order to use their corporate software. When one of their products ‘expired’ on my computer, without warning, they wiped the entire disk of its presence, along with whatever personal data I had stored there.
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